Laravel 5.1 Session and Socket.IO + Redis - Sending Notifications to Logged In (Known) Users and Group Of Users

I am working on a project where I want to implement real-time notifications for a specific group of users (with role of Admin) and after some research, I understood that I'll need the session in order to know which users are logged in (by default they are anonymous).

Also, I'll need to implement notifications to specific users only. (only one user, example: John Doe)

So, my questions are:

1. How can I transfer the session/cookie over to the NodeJS side through Redis and then emit the notification?

2. What should I do exactly?

3. Any encryption / decryption?

Anyone ever had any chance to implement anything like this?

There's almost no info about this on the internet and most of the tutorials are way too basic for my use case.

I am using Laravel 5.1 Broadcasting features to publish some notifications and display them in real-time with Socket.io (version 1.3.7). I also use Redis (version 3), NodeJS (version 5) and Express (version 4.13).

Thanks for reading!

via Chebli Mohamed